End Times – Daniel Secomb – Bible Teacherhttp://www.danielsecomb.com
Bringing you fresh insights from God's Word.Wed, 10 Oct 2018 21:04:20 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.936770340The Suppression of Truth and the Dumbing Down of the Westhttp://www.danielsecomb.com/the-suppression-of-truth-and-the-dumbing-down-of-the-west/
http://www.danielsecomb.com/the-suppression-of-truth-and-the-dumbing-down-of-the-west/#respondWed, 10 Oct 2018 20:54:00 +0000http://www.danielsecomb.com/?p=560It might seem unusual to write an end times article on the suppression of truth, yet I believe it is key to understanding the last days pagan society that we are living in today.

The Bible is clear that the kind of society that we are to expect in the period preceding the return of the Lord is one of exceeding great wickedness. Jesus warned of an increase of wickedness in the last days (Matt 24:12a) and then gave us an example of the kind of society we should expect. He said it would be just as it was in the “days of Noah” (Luke 17:26). What were the days of Noah like? Well, it was a time of so much grievous wickedness and evil that we find the saddest verse in the Bible.

“The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled.” – Genesis 6:6-7

No other time in human history do we find God saying that he regretted creating man, than we do with the days of Noah. Yet, Jesus warned that this extreme pagan wickedness would appear on the earth once again in the days leading up to his return.

A key scripture that gives us valuable insight into how and why a society descends into pagan immorality is Romans 1:18-32. The very first verse of this passage sums up the state in which we find ourselves in the West.

“The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness” (v.18)

And in verses 21b and 22a:

“…their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools…”

We are certainly living in a time where truth is being suppressed on a massive scale. Right across the West, we are systematically being dumbed down as a result of the media, technology, entertainment, and the educational institutions.

Secular social scientists are beginning to notice this disturbing trend. A new study, conducted by Norwegian scientists, shows that IQ scores of today’s young people are in sharp decline.

Their study revealed that the IQ points of those tested peaked among those born in 1975, while people born in 1991 scored five points lower. They say this shift could be due to many factors, including the way children are brought up and educated. For example, there is less focus on subjects like mathematics and languages, while the total amount of time spent watching television or using technology has increased significantly.

Breitbart News previously reported that the number of people buying books in Germany plummeted by nearly 18 percent between 2013 and 2017, the study commissioned by the German Publishers and Booksellers Association found.

The drop was even steeper at 24 to 37 percent among those aged 20 to 50 — the same age group that now spends more than three hours a day on the internet.

Streaming services like Netflix with their binge-worthy television series in particular “exert a great appeal” and frequently replace books as a pastime, it said.

The dumbing down of society is also particularly noted by the type of people that society looks to for advice and guidance. Once upon a time, people looked to godly thinkers, philosophers and theologians in regard to the issues of the day. Now, it’s entertainers and celebrities who dictate what is morally acceptable and what isn’t.

In yesteryear, popular TV shows contained characters with virtuous, noble and interesting personalities. Today, many of the most popular TV shows feature characters with extremely shallow personalities engaging in petty conversations and gossip.

Even sports stars are considered role models and looked to for their political opinions on the national conversation. Why?

Interestingly, all these shifts in our culture was noted by famed science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein back in the 1980’s. He said,

“But there seems to have been an actual decline in rational thinking. The United States had become a place where entertainers and professional athletes were mistaken for people of importance. They were idolized and treated as leaders; their opinions were sought on everything and they took themselves just as seriously — after all, if an athlete is paid a million or more a year, he knows he is important … so his opinions of foreign affairs and domestic policies must be important, too, even though he proves himself to be both ignorant and subliterate every time he opens his mouth.”

Our children are deliberately being dumbed down in our schools and universities. One of the greatest mistakes that many parents make today is assuming that the college that they’re sending their kids to is the same college that they went to. They couldn’t be more mistaken. There has been a seismic shift in the education institutions of America over the past 50 years. The college radical activists in the 1960s and 70s have become today’s tenured professors. These professors are no longer interested producing graduates with good job prospects, but rather producing dedicated leftist activists.

The rot in the education institutions first started back in 1962 when prayer was taken out of schools. This watershed moment in American history cannot be overstated enough. This event ushered in the age of post-modernism, moral relativism and nihilism where the truth of God creating the heavens and the earth was suppressed and the lie of evolution became the norm. Young Americans were then taught that they had come from nothing, live for no reason, and are going nowhere. Slowly but surely, this had a devastating impact on America’s young, which has resulted in much of the social dysfunction such as family breakdown, depression, sexual promiscuity, drug abuse, domestic violence, divorce, absent fathers, teenage pregnancy and suicide.

Incidentally, when young people are taught that they’ve come from animals, it should not surprise us that they then behave like them. As winter follows fall, the sexual revolution began in earnest as a result of the establishment of the secular worldview in American education. Predictably, the legalization of abortion came hot on the heels of the sexual revolution with the Supreme Court ruling on Roe vs. Wade in 1973. The diabolical ruling paved the way for over 54 million babies sacrificed on the neo-pagan altar of ‘sexual liberation’. As Romans 6:23a says, “The wages of sin is death”.

The rejection of Christian values from America’s centers of learning opened up a can of worms of ‘anything goes’ moral relativism. As G.K. Chesterton said, “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”

The concept of “truth” itself has come under attack and now the vast majority of American universities teach that there is no such thing as objective truth. This in effect, has given way to the rise of Leftism and the SJW (social justice warrior) phenomenon. Considering there is no moral accountability, then the sole motivation for people becomes their own happiness. Hence, one’s feelings are even more important than facts.

So we have got to the point where truth and logic has given way to madness and an entire generation are being taught ridiculous concepts such as ‘sexual orientation’ and that ‘sexual orientation’ is fixed, yet your gender is fluid. In fact, they’re teaching young people that their gender is on a spectrum that can fluctuate from day to day. Yes, this is what they’re teaching your kids in college.

I am reminded of the quote by famed conservative writer and economist Thomas Sowell, “In a democracy, we have always had to worry about the ignorance of the uneducated. Today we have to worry about the ignorance of people with college degrees.” And as prominent conservative columnist Dennis Prager said, “You would have to have gone to college to believe something that stupid.”

Yet, the dumbing down of Americans is partly consequential and partly deliberate. In many instances, political policy, school curriculums and media narratives have been framed to dumb people down in order for them to easily be controlled and manipulated. We can expect in the last days, that more and more politicians (particularly on the Left) will seek to control and manipulate people in order to get their votes.

Sadly, it’s not just the secular aspects of Western Society who have been dumbed down, but also much of the church. Dennis Prager made a sobering, yet telling observation about Evangelical Christians in America today, “One thing I notice about Evangelicals is that they do not read. They do not read the Bible, they do not read the great Christian thinkers, they have never heard of Aquinas . . . I do not understand. I have bookcases of Christian books and I am a Jew. Why do I have more Christian books than 98 percent of Christians in America?”

The lack of discipline to read and study the Bible coupled with decades of “lifestyle preaching” from America’s pulpits has lead to a theologically malnourished church suffering from an epidemic of Biblical illiteracy.

Considering this, it should not surprise us when we see Christians put the LGBT rainbow flag over their Facebook profile and standing with abhorrent organisations such as Planned Parenthood. We are living in a day where many Christians today confuse grace with leniency, confuse holiness with legalism, and confuse ‘judging’ with mere criticism.

The proliferation of ‘pep talk Christianity’ and the lack of expository Bible teaching in church today have done essentially two things.

Firstly, it has watered down the gospel message. As John MacArthur previously quipped, “Sin has become less offensive, heaven less appealing, hell less horrific and the gospel less urgent.” Christians have lost their ‘saltiness’ and have become incapable of preventing the world from falling into decay. As the saying goes, when the church loses its voice, the world loses its conscience.

Secondly, it has created an environment that enables false teachers to flourish. Again, this is part of the end times scenario that Jesus warned of in Matt 24:11, “…and many false prophets will appear and deceive many people.” Consequently, the result of the mass deception is the great falling away.

The inevitable rotten fruit of the great falling away is the increase of wickedness, which leads us to the Romans 1 scenario that we now find ourselves in. Three times in Romans 1, it says that God “gave them over” (vv.24,26,28) as a consequence of the suppression of truth. We are living in a time where we can say with certainty that this very thing is happening right now with Western Civilization.

It may be unsettling reading about the sad moral decline of Western Civilization, but these are things that we must examine in light of the clear signs of Christ’s return. We may choose to be discouraged by these sobering events, or we can be encouraged by the fact that Christ is at the door. Hallelujah!

May we seek the Lord to restore the foundational principle in our nation that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

]]>http://www.danielsecomb.com/the-suppression-of-truth-and-the-dumbing-down-of-the-west/feed/0560Subversion: How a Change of Tactic Helped the Left and Islam Capture the Westhttp://www.danielsecomb.com/subversion-how-a-change-of-tactic-helped-the-left-and-islam-capture-the-west/
http://www.danielsecomb.com/subversion-how-a-change-of-tactic-helped-the-left-and-islam-capture-the-west/#respondWed, 31 May 2017 15:59:00 +0000http://www.danielsecomb.com/?p=472You’re going to have to hand it to the Islamists. Their change of tactic to defeat the West has been a masterstroke of genius.

Islam’s initial tactic of military confrontation with the West came to a grinding halt at the Gates of Vienna in 1683. Had the Muslim armies prevailed, they stood to overrun Christian Europe and the entire continent would’ve become part of the Muslim Ottoman Empire.

However, the emergence of the Muslim Brotherhood under the leadership of Hassan al-Banna in 1922 would breath new life into the ambitions of Islam to dominate the West. Acknowledging their inability to confront the West via military means, they sought a change of strategy which would prove to be nothing short of brilliant. The Muslim Brotherhood laid out a plan of infiltrating the West from within via what can be described as a “cultural jihad”.

The father of ‘Cultural Jihad’ Hassan al-Banna.

In an official document uncovered by federal investigators in 2004, the Muslim Brotherhood’s strategic goals for North America was chillingly outlined from a meeting held by the organization in 1991. Here is a short excerpt:

“The process of settlement is a ‘Civilization-Jihadist Process’ with all the word means. The Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers…” (p.7)

Their plan is a grass-roots approach in slowly infiltrating Western society by undermining its institutions and cultural centres of influence and using the West’s liberal ideals such as freedom of speech, tolerance, inclusivity against itself—and two decades later, their success has been unprecedented.

The father of ‘Cultural Marxism’ Antonio Gramsci

Ironically, this is the exact same strategy deployed by the Left. Karl Marx’s original goal of confronting the West by military means failed with the symbolic fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. However, Marxism never went away with the demise of the Soviet Union, but rather changed its tactics to infiltration and subversion. Their efforts in this undertaking was spearheaded by an “unholy” trinity of the Fabian Society, the Frankfurt School, and an Italian communist named Antonio Gramsci. All three have been nothing short of devastating in their efforts to destroy the West via cultural subversion. There is a lot to say about the work of the Fabian Society and the Frankfurt School, yet Gramsci is perhaps the most influential figure behind the West’s cultural rot and social decay. Gramsci differed with Marx’s tactic of confronting the West via military means. Instead he opted for an incremental approach of infiltrating the West’s cultural and political spheres of influence. Eighty years after Gramsci’s death and his strategy of “the long march through the institutions” has borne remarkable fruit—and not in a good way.

Another very interesting point about Gramsci was how he differed with Marx in their strategy to destroy the church. Marx believed that the church should be confronted through brute physical force with shutting down churches and imprisoning Christians. Gramsci on the other hand believed that the churches themselves could be infiltrated and used as an effective tool against Christianity itself and consequently Western society as a result.

The West therefore faces an ominous future. What was once a shining example of Christian civilization which brought individual liberty and freedom of speech/religion/inquiry to the masses has been gradually seduced to a proverbial prostitute riding an Islamic beast. The inebriated prostitute rides the beast in a show of defiance and overweening pride, arrogantly preaching its doctrine of multiculturalism and equality while being completely delusional that the beast she is riding will turn on her. The joyous honeymoon of the Left’s marriage with Islam will soon subside and will slowly but surely bring her to her ruin and inevitably burn her with fire.

Of course, the Left is completely oblivious to all this. They are in state of “political correctness paralysis” and are incapable of seeing the danger of the beast that they are riding on. Islam on the other hand are infinitely patient with their strategy. Their recipe of “cultural jihad” has been tried and tested, and one needs to look no further than their success with countries which have capitulated to Islam.

Lebanon used to be known as the “Paris” of the Middle East and the banking capital of the Middle East. It was the only Christian majority country in the Middle East. Yet, Lebanon gradually became lax with its Christian heritage and gradually slid into liberalism and embraced “tolerance” and “multiculturalism”, and Islam took advantage of their liberal ideals and from 1958 to 1990 Lebanon fell to Islam.

The same story with Iran. Before the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Iran was a very liberal democracy that emphasised tolerance and multiculturalism. The left wing Tudeh Party which was proudly Marxist in its political leanings openly embraced Muslim immigrants and encouraged Islam to flourish in the spirit of cultural diversity. Inevitably, Ayatollah Khomeini swept to power in the 1979 Iranian Revolution in an environment made possible by years of leftwing liberal policies. In 1982, the Islamist government of Iran had closed down the Tudeh newspaper, and purged Tudeh members from government ministries. The Islamists then arrested and imprisoned its leadership and later more than 10,000 members of the party. During February 1983, the leaders of the Tudeh Party were arrested and the Party disbanded, leaving Iran effectively a one-party state. From 1 May 1983 to May 1984 almost all the Tudeh leadership appeared in videos, first individually and then jointly in an October 1983 “roundtable discussion,” confessing to “treason”, “subversion”, “horrendous crimes”, praising Islam and proclaiming Islamic government’s superiority over atheistic Marxism-Leninism. As a result of these purges the party gradually collapsed, with a great number of members leaving the country into exile. It is likely many hundreds Tudeh prisoners were killed during the 1988 executions of Iranian political prisoners when thousands of leftist prisoners were killed. One report lists 90 Tudeh killed in just some blocks of Evin and Gohar Dasht prisons.

Egypt was a Christian country, but it too became tolerant, multicultural and a liberal democracy. Syria was a bastion of numerous Christian communities that have been in existence for thousands of years. Yet again, Islam crept in. Turkey was a democracy which embraced multiculturalism for many years and only earlier this year, via a staged coup, Recip Erdogan has solidified control and is paving the way for an Islamic republic in an effort to revive the Islamic Ottoman Empire.

Again, Islam uses the West’s liberal ideals against itself in very much the same fashion as Joseph Stalin once remarked, “When we hang the capitalists they will sell us the rope.” The Left naively thinks that the Islamists will join them in destroying Christian culture and then joyfully join them in their multicultural utopia. Well, as we have seen with Lebanon and Iran, the Left will be the first to go. The most sobering part of all this, is that this principle happened regionally in certain epochs of time, yet we are now witnessing this happening on a global scale. The West is ripe for God’s judgement and God is using Islam to do it.

The Left and its abominable agendas has brought on God’s judgement on the West, and Islam is the instrument of God’s judgement on the West. The Old Testament prophet Habakkuk complained that God wasn’t doing anything about the sin and injustices of the inhabitants of Jerusalem. God responded to Habakkuk by saying that he is doing something. The prophet replied with “Well, what? What are you doing about it?” And God said “I am raising up the Babylonians.” Habakkuk then protested God by saying he was doing too much! And in the same way, God is raising up Islam as an instrument of his judgement to judge the West, and if you know anything about God’s method of judgement, he always judges nations and individuals in degree of severity based on their revelation and understanding of the Truth. As the nation of Israel was judged harshly by God because they should’ve known better for knowing the truth (see Rom 3:2), so the nations will be judged so much more harshly if they were privileged to be raised on a foundation of Christianity and therefore should’ve known better.

Those who think that America is strong enough to withstand the onslaught of the Left and Islam are sadly deluded. The sins of America are piled up to heaven.

55 million abortions since Roe vs Wade

The promotion, celebration and global export of homosexuality.

The tsunami of pornography. Pornography (including child pornography) is getting darker and more extreme.

The destruction of gender from marriage and from society

I don’t say these things lightly, but with a heavy heart and a grieved spirit. Billy Graham was right when he said, “If God were to excuse America for her sin, he would have to apologise to Sodom and Gomorrah.”

As an Australian, as someone from the outside looking in, I shudder at the thought of America losing her role as global leader. America’s was blessed by God because of her righteousness and Christian heritage and as such she has been a great blessing to the world. We’re living in a time of “Pax Americana” where America’s superpower status and Christian influence has brought stability and peace for the world. Yet, the sobering reality is this: If America goes down, so does the rest of us. Ronald Reagan aptly said, “If we lose freedom here, there is no other place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.”

If America goes down, there will be a plausible scenario of Russia invading Eastern Europe, China invading Taiwan and expanding into the South China Sea and beyond, North Korea invading South Korea, and the entire Muslim World will turn on Israel. The collapse of America will plunge the world into darkness reminiscent to the aftermath of the collapse of the Roman Empire.

As Christians we have a solemn responsibility to get right with God in repentance and to get down on our knees in prayer. Once we get up off our knees we need to get to action and mobilize the church into taking America back for God. I believe America has a window of opportunity of three and a half years until the next election in 2020. This election will be pivotal and could make or break America. Freedom is on the line. A Democrat win could will see all the nefarious agendas of the Left back into place, including open borders, mass Islamic refugee intake, the LGBT agenda and the abortion agenda forced upon churches and Christian institutions and much, much worse. There is so much at stake within the next three and a half years. Will you commit to prayer and mobilize to action?

Again, to quote Ronald Reagan on his prophetic insight, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”

The church father Augustine of Hippo is without a doubt the central figure associated with the eschatological view of amillennialism. His viewpoint became the prevailing doctrine of the Roman Church, and it was adopted with variations by most of the Protestant Reformers along with many other teachings of Augustine.[1] To this day, it has become the basis for amillennialism, which would dominate the Christian church until well into the modern period.[2]

Augustine is considered as the primary adventist of amillennialism primarily because there are no acceptable exponents of amillennialism before him.[3] Prior to Augustine’s formulation of the doctrine, various elements of amillennialism were associated with the heresies produced by the allegorizing and spiritualizing school of theology at Alexandria, which not only opposed premillennialism, but set out to abolish any literal exegesis of Scripture whatsoever.[4] For Augustine, his main concern was to understand the ‘spiritual’ message of the Old Testament in terms of allegories evolved by the Alexandrian school.[5]

Augustine favoured the allegorical method of interpretation over other methods primarily because he believed that the Bible had been ‘veiled’ by God in order to ‘exercise’ the seeker.[6] He believed that only the profound man could grasp the deeper meaning, the ‘spirit’. For beneath the deceptive simplicity of the Hebrew constructions from Old Testament passages, he had chosen to see the great complexity of his own views, veiled to the unenquiring mind, and a source of wonder to the philosopher.[7]

Augustine’s exemplary literary catalyst, which propelled his viewpoint of amillennialism to the masses, was without a doubt his magnum opus work City of God (written from ca. AD 413 to ca. 426). In the book, Augustine describes the present age as a conflict between the City of God and the City of Satan, or the conflict between the church and the world. This was viewed as moving on to the ultimate triumph of the church to be climaxed by a tremendous struggle in which the church would be apparently defeated, only to consummate in a tremendous triumph in the second coming of Christ to the earth. Augustine held that the present age of conflict is the millennium[8] and argues that many Christians misunderstand Revelation 20:1-6 by thinking that the first resurrection is physical and that the thousand years will be a form of Sabbath rest for God’s people. He, like Origen before him, views premillennialism as an overly extravagant event that turns the kingdom into an occasion for the exercise of gluttony and other lusts.[9] Augustine writes, “This notion would be in some degree tolerable if it were believed that in that Sabbath some delights of a spiritual character were to be available for the saints because of the presence of the Lord. I also entertained this notion at one time. But in fact those people assert that those who have risen again will spend their rest in the most unrestrained material feasts.”[10][11] Thus on trivial grounds, Augustine abandons the literal interpretation of Revelation 20. Somehow, for all his genius, he did not see that he could abandon this false teaching without abandoning the doctrine of a literal millennium.[12]

As a consequence to his allegorical approach to spiritually interpreting the millennium as this present age, Augustine was therefore forced to interpret the bounding of Satan to be in effect in this present age as well. Yet, this idea poses obvious problems. While the Christian can have victory over Satan, there is no evidence whatsoever that Satan is presently inactive or bound in this present age.[13] It can be stated flatly that Augustine’s exegesis is an outright error as far as the binding of Satan is concerned.[14] The exegesis of Augustine on Revelation 20 as a whole fares no better. After concluding that the binding of Satan is synonymous with the victory of Christ in His first advent, he draws the strained conclusion that the “first resurrection” of Revelation 20:5 is the spiritual birth of believers.[15] To spiritualize this portion of Scripture to make it conform to the course of the present age is to destroy all its plain literary meaning. Augustine’s view required also, of course, the spiritualization of the many Old Testament passages bearing on the future righteous kingdom on earth, and this he does in his treatment of the Old Testament.[16]

It would be fair to say that Augustine’s propagation of amillennialism has done an enormous amount of damage to the churches understanding of eschatology. It should be pointed out that his allegorical method of interpretation to develop the doctrine of amillennialism never existed before the likes of Clement and Origen and the Alexandrian School.

When it comes to Biblical prophecy, if the method of interpretation is wrong, it entirely disrupts the way people understand eschatology. The only people who work with prophetic texts with precision and care and specificity are those who interpret the Bible literally (as the Jews would understand it) and end up as premillennialists. Once you say that the scripture doesn’t mean what it says, then all precision is gone. It’s a tragic tale in church history that Augustine’s “few degrees off course” on this topic, has in the course of time in its set trajectory, sent the church off thousands of miles in the wrong direction. Things could have been so different provided more solid Biblical principles of interpretation were followed.

[11] Augustine also wrote, “This opinion [a future literal millennium after the resurrection] might be allowed, if it proposed only spiritual delight unto the saints during this space (and we were once of the same opinion ourselves); but seeing the avouchers hereof affirm that the saints after this resurrection shall do nothing but revel in fleshly banquets, where the cheer shall exceed both modesty and measure, this is gross and fit for none but carnal men to believe. But they that are really and truly spiritual do call those of this opinion Chiliasts.” City of God 20.7.

Premillennialism, also known as ‘chiliasm’ (from the Greek χίλια ἔτη, “a thousand years,” Rev 20:2-3) is the belief of a visible reign of Christ in glory on earth with the risen saints for a thousand years, before the general resurrection and judgment. It was indeed not the doctrine of the church embodied in any creed or form of devotion, but a widely current opinion of distinguished teachers, such as Barnabas, Papias, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Methodius, and Lactantius.[1]

The Apostle Barnabas was the first to make reference to a literal millennium in his epistle, when he refers to the “seventh day” as a reference to the millennium. He says the following:

Notice, my children, what he says, “He finished in six days.” This means that in six thousand years the Lord will finish all things; for with him the day means a thousand years; for David witnesses to me saying, that “a thousand years in thine eyes are as yesterday which is past, and as a watch in the night.” And he himself witnesses to me, saying, “Behold, a day of the Lord shall be as a thousand years.” Therefore, my children, in six days, that is, in the six thousand years, all things will be finished. “And he rested on the seventh day.” This means, when his Son on coming shall destroy the time, and shall judge the ungodly, and shall change the sun and the stars and the moon, then he will truly rest on the seventh day.[2]

Justin Martyr, in the second century, declares the millennium to be the catholic doctrine of his time.[3] In his famous Dialogue With Trypho, he says,

But I and others, who are right-minded Christians on all points, are assured that there will be a resurrection of the dead, and a thousand years in Jerusalem, which will then be built, adorned, and enlarged, the prophets Ezekiel and Isaiah and others declare.[4]

Irenaeus, writing at about A.D. 185, speaks of the Antichrist reigning from the Temple in Jerusalem, only to be conquered by Christ and then ushering in the “times of the kingdom”. He writes,

But when this Antichrist shall have devastated all things in this world, he will reign for three years and six months, and sit in the Temple at Jerusalem; and then the Lord will come from heaven in the clouds, in the glory of the Father, sending this man and those who follow him into the lake of fire; but bringing in for the righteous the times of the kingdom.[5]

Interestingly, Irenaeus writes that the early church father Papias (ca 70 – 155 AD) claims (in a work now lost) that there was a conversation between Jesus and the disciples where he referred to the millennium.[6] As the story goes, Judas expressed incredulity about whether such an earthly kingdom could really come about and that Jesus replied that those who came to these times would see it.[7] This shows that, in Irenaeus’ eyes, chiliasm is the teaching of both the Lord and his church and that nonchiliastic eschatologies are the product of Gnostic influence, even when they are held by genuinely orthodox Christians.[8] It is highly significant that Justin, the greatest of the second-century apologists, and Irenaeus, the first great theologian of the church, that both believed that a physical, earthly kingdom of Christ after his return was the teaching of the Lord, the Scriptures, and the majority of the early church.[9] Yet, by the time of the third century, Premillennialism drastically began to disappear as a result of Origen and Augustine’s arrival on the scene. During Origen’s time as the head of the School of Alexandria, he openly attacked chiliasm and developed the allegorical method of interpretation by which he interpreted spiritually and not literally the passages of Scripture, which announced the millennium. Origen’s major qualms about an earthly millennium are that it entails reading scripture too literally (as the Jews would read it) and that it conceives of the Christian hope too sensuously. In place of premillennialism, Origen offers a Christian hope that is almost exclusively spiritual and intellectual.[10] Origen was writing at a time when Christianity was trying to disengage itself from its Jewish roots, and at that time, it was very common to reject any interpretation of Scripture that had Jewish precedent.[11] By the time Augustine came on the scene in the early 5th century, he further developed the allegorical method of biblical interpretation and spiritualised all biblical passages speaking of an earthly kingdom. He, like Origen before him, viewed Premillennialism as an overly extravagant event that turned the kingdom into an occasion for the exercise of gluttony and other lusts.[12] The death knell for Premillennialism in the church was complete with the widespread readership of his magnum opus, City of God in which Augustine teaches that this present age of conflict is the millennium[13] and argues that many Christians misunderstand Revelation 20:1-6 by thinking that the first resurrection is physical and that the thousand years will be a form of Sabbath rest for God’s people. Augustine’s explanation was clearly a much more responsible attempt at a biblical eschatology than what we find in Origen, and it became the basis for Amillennialism, which would dominate the Christian church until well into the modern period.[14] It is important to note that the spurning of Premillennialism was very much to do with early Gnostic influence and Neo-Platonist philosophies stemming from the Alexandrian School. It’s such a tragedy that the allegorical method of scriptural interpretation prevailed considering that it never existed before the middle of the second century. One wonders what could have been if the church had embraced its Hebraic roots and interpreted scripture the same way it always had done by placing the burden of interpretation on scripture itself. The plain straight-forward reading of the text was always God’s intention and is still God’s intention for us today.

[4] Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, p. 87. Online: http://www.theologynetwork.org/Media/PDF/Justin_Martyr-Dialogue_with_Trypho.pdf [cited: May 24, 2013] Justin Martyr also goes on to say immediately afterward, “For Isaiah spake thus concerning this space of a thousand years” and then quotes Isaiah 65:17-25. He then goes on to say, “Now we have understood that the expression used among these words, ‘According to the days of the tree [of life] shall be the days of my people; the works of their toil shall abound’ obscurely predicts a thousand years. For as Adam was told that in the nay fie ate of the tree he would die, we know that he did not complete a thousand years. We have perceived, moreover, that the expression, ‘The day of the Lord is as a thousand years,’ is connected with this subject. And further, there was a certain man with us, whose name was John, one of the apostles of Christ, who prophesied, by a revelation that was made to him, that those who believed in our Christ would dwell a thousand years in Jerusalem; and that thereafter the general, and, in short, the eternal resurrection and judgment of all men would likewise take place. Just as our Lord also said, ‘They shall neither marry nor be given in marriage, but shall be equal to the angels, the children of the God of the resurrection.’” (Ibid. 87-88)